Segmentation in HE – a frequently overlooked form of the reproduction of inequality

Presentation by: Slavko Gaber & Veronika Tašner, of the Centre for Educational Policy Studies at the University of Ljubljana, Slovenia.

Abstract

The expansion of the numbers of tertiary education students is a dangerous facilitator of possible illusions related to education and its equity and equality potential.

While educational “elevator” after WW2 moved numerous proportions of the population to a higher level of education scale, social inequalities, namely, didn’t disappear. The efficiency of education in reducing social inequalities remained limited.

Recent analyses for Slovenia demonstrate that while the number of those enrolled in tertiary education almost tripled over the last 15 years and the number of graduates also went up from app. 6.000 to almost 16.000, social origin still counts in educational achievement.

The students from the lower and lower middle class “opted” for and earned degrees from shorter cycle study programs and if not that, in a far greater number of cases, they have “decided” to attend less prestigious university programs (teachers, technical professions etc.), while students of upper middle class and higher class origins “opted” for and achieved degrees in law, architecture and medicine – a case of vertical segmentation (Ringer 1989).

The question is why this reproduction of inequality persists so strongly. Why it is so efficient while we educationalists are able only to increase the number of pupils and students enrolled while the social inequalities stubbornly stay the same.

While it may seem strange, it looks like, in accordance with the inner logic of education, that we, the teachers and policy makers, tend to perceive education as a socially neutral facilitator and transmitter of knowledge and culture and, as such, by definition reduces social inequalities.

We didn’t, and we don’t, accept the fact that the very process of schooling is socially-biased. We don’t accept what Bernstein, Bourdieu and Passeron, Ringer, Apple and others are communicating: that middle and upper class students feel right at home in schooling – as fish in water. On the other hand, students from lower class and lower middle class backgrounds are struggling with translations from the cultures they know to the school culture, and back again. In this process, they lag behind.

And yet, we frequently treat these students as equal in front of the “throne” of knowledge. They are all admitted – enrolment is growing, the number of degrees, too. And if we do acknowledge differences in populations, we ascribe them to ABILITY or to EFFORT. An ideology of meritocracy is, like it or not, accepted as a guiding principle in most education nowadays. Behind it, the “social inequality that results can then claim legitimacy – as ascriptive inequality cannot – in that it contributes to the efficient functioning of the society as a whole and in that superior rewards, because they reflect superior achievement, are deserved” (Goldthorpe 2003, 664).

Author Biographies

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